Don't come to Amsterdam and take drugs without knowing how to deal with it, please. This kind of stupidity is exactly what got psilocybin mushrooms banned here.
I'm Dutch and I live there (born and raised, I've seen way too many examples how drugs can screw people over because of being raised in Amsterdam). Nevertheless, it doesn't matter whether I live there or not. Experimenting with psilocybin is not easy, even when you're experienced with weed and alcohol.
Here was my thought process:
First time: I did half, that went amazingly well
Second time: I did a full dose, and I had the suicidal bad trip experience
Third time: full dose, got into a bad trip state again (just bad trip). I recognized the experience and knew what would happen, how to deal with it. It was completely fine. It was a wonderful experience.
Fourth time: potential explosive dangerous situation with the other person who used it (also did it 4 times, 4th time together with me as well). Crisis averted, having a tripsitter in this case (like in the second case) was an absolute must.
These experiences has happened in a span of 3 years, spread out quite evenly. I took it because of the research on psilocybin.
Truffles has been my first psychedelic. Ultimately, for me it has had positive effects.
It is what it is. Be careful, have a tripsitter. Not having a tripsitter was the biggest mistake I've made.
For other folx reading this, if you're keen on trying this, try to get ahold of 4-HO-DMT instead - it is an identical experience to psilocybin (psilocybin converts to 4-HO-DMT in your body, which causes its effects), but can be dosed exactly to the milligram, greatly reducing your chances of accidentally taking too much.
Also prevents the stomach pains of digesting lots of dry fibrous mushrooms. For the same reason, the experience with 4-HO-DMT can be shorter/quicker than with mushrooms but not by much.
I’ve found the following to be key in a good experience:
1. Do not take too much. This cannot be overstated. You don’t need to take 4 tabs of LSD, you don’t need to take a 1/4 oz of shrooms. Take the right, safe amount. Usually 1 tab or a 1/16th oz will do for me. Double that if I’m feeling up to it. I’m a larger person too.
2. Set/setting. Are you emotionally and physically prepared to go on a trip that could get _very_ complicated? Lots of people think they are when they're not.
Trip sitters can be helpful, but they do not guarantee a good trip by any means. Sometimes a person being around you that isn’t on the same plane of existence can make a situation needlessly uncomfortable. I’ve had a moment where we had to ask a trip sitter to leave mid-trip when things went sour. Once he left, we felt we could deal with things more naturally.
If it’s one of your first few times, a trip sitter could be great. Make sure it’s someone everyone in the group deeply trusts and likes. I’ve found I have better experiences without them personally.
The problem is that if a person wants to learn how to deal with it legally, they have no other possibility than to come to a place like Amsterdam.
Wouldn't the solution rather be for Amsterdam to create a "newbie coffee shops" or something similar?
1. Create safe newbie-friendly places that provide an opportunity to safely experience a legal drug X.
2. Mandate that for a foreigner to buy a legal drug X, they must have an ID-like document that says they are experienced with X.
3. Once a tourist experiences X in a newbie-friendly place, they award him/her with an ID-like document that enables the tourist to buy X on their own.
Surely that create more jobs and opportunities in Amsterdam than the "bug off!" rhetoric I've seen from the local Amsterdam government.
To be clear, the staff in coffee shops do ask you if it's your first time and give you guidelines for how to use them safely, and usually informative leaflets are attached. At least in tourist places.
I've heard from friends that this exactly happens with DMT experiences. I'm not sure if DMT is legal here (they make it themselves, the ingredients are legal). Yet, they somehow advertize it publicly (?).
"This kind of stupidity is exactly what got psilocybin mushrooms banned here."
Then why didn't alcohol, which causes way more problems than mushrooms, also get banned?
Downvoters and skeptics: You do realize that alcohol is involved in countless suicides, homicides, and other violence (not to mention the ravages of alcoholism), don't you?
It's the worst substance of the two, by far.
Amsterdam is one of the drinking capitals of Europe. Way more touists come to Amsterdam to get drunk than ever have to eat mushrooms, and they've always caused way more problems. But alcohol will never be banned there. Why the double standard?
The UK government did not like that study, because it showed that many illegal drugs were ultimately much less overall harm to society (the direct users as well as those around them and the healthcare system) than alcohol.
Did the study take into account the prevalence of each substance? Alcohol would be the most prevalent by a wide margin. If it's normalized for prevalence however, then the results are mighty interesting.
Yes, it was normalized. It was a very comprehensive, well thought out study. Of course the researchers could still get the results they wanted by choosing which metrics to include in the comparisons, but the choices attempted to balance individual cost (physical, mental) with social (family suffering, divorce) and societal (burden on society from underperforming people, shared health costs, etc.)
The takeway was that alcohol was one of the worst, along with crack cocaine and heroin; ecstacy was really not bad, and weed was a bit worse but still nowhere near as overall costly/damaging as alcohol.
Century ago United States tried to ban alcohol, and it simply didn't work - it is way too easy to produce it from innocent food products. Exotic mushrooms or artificial drugs are much easier to ban.
Some species like Psilocybe semilanceata grow in the wild, both in Europe and North America. You can just pick them if you know the type of habbitats to look for.
You can buy grow kits semi-legally (grey area, might vary on where you live) and you don't need any extra equipment. You get a plastic box and you literally just add water.
If you want to save money, you can buy only the spores. Then you just need some substrate which you can buy either at garden supply store or at a supermarket. Biggest issue is ensuring sterility, so a pressure cooker is recommended, but there are ways around that.
I'd say it's easier to grow shrooms at home than it is to make alcohol. You don't need any specific equiment like a still for distilled drinks, and you don't need any trial and error like you do when making fermented drinks. I know you could make alcohol without any equipment, but the end result will probably be quite poor. Meanwhile the shrooms grown without any equipment will be the same as any.
"Exotic mushrooms or artificial drugs are much easier to ban."
You can ban them, but your ban won't be any more effective than the ban on alcohol.
It's easy to get pretty much any drug you want.. especially in Amsterdam.
All the ban does is moves the market underground, gets organized crime involved, makes it much harder for users to tell they're getting what they paid for (possibly leading to all sorts of adverse effects like overdoses), and ruins people's lives when they're thrown in jail.
We know drug bans don't work and are counterproductive.
It's sad to see the Netherlands buy in to anti-drug hysteria after being one of the leading lights in constructive drug policy and harm-reduction for so long.
Exactly this. What happens south of US border is absolutely the same as the effect of 1920s prohibition. Communism and prohibition both looks good and neither works.
How, exactly, is the average person supposed to do them, then? It isn't like most countries let you walk into a shop and buy them. Realistically, it is the only way many people will ever get to do them legally. And realistically, if you are wanting to do psychedelics, you might not even find the same sort (I've generally found more opportunities to do LSD than truffles or mushrooms, for example).
Your words are kind of like telling young folks not to go and buy alcohol without knowing how to deal with it. The only way to learn is to take them.
"It isn't like most countries let you walk into a shop and buy them."
No. But you can walk in to the forest and pick them.
You really do need to identify them properly, though, and not just pick random mushrooms.
For help in doing that I can highly recommend Alan Rockefeller's excellent videos on psilocybin mushroom identification: [1] [2]
Another option is getting mushroom spores (which are legal in most states in the US) and growing them yourself.[3][4]
There are also various other legal psychedelics, like morning glory seeds[5], hawaiian baby woodrose seeds, and salvia divinorum[6].
Some sorts of breathwork (like holotropic breathing) is actually effective at inducing altered states of consciousness comparable for some people to psychedelics. It's not clear how safe such breathwork is long-term, as not enough serious studies of it has been done, but at least breathing is perfectly legal everywhere.. last I checked.
"No. But you can walk in to the forest and pick them."
If you live by such forests. I happen to now (and do), but I haven't always had such a luxury.
And again, lots of folks don't have the luxury of growing.
Just because there are other "legal" options doesn't mean much: These are going to act differently than what you get in Amsterdam.
I have no doubt that breathwork can make altered states, but I very highly doubt it is comparable to drugs. And again, this isn't really going to prepare you for, say, truffles in Amsterdam. If you don't like breathwork, you can just stop and do something else. If you don't like where you are at on drugs, you just have to wait.
"I have no doubt that breathwork can make altered states, but I very highly doubt it is comparable to drugs."
I was super skeptical myself.. so much so that even though I'd heard of holotropic breathwork at least a couple of decades ago I didn't bother to try it because it just sounded like complete bullshit.
But I did eventually try it, about a year ago, and I was amazed that it did in fact induce a state that was comparable to at least a low dose of psychedelics. Some people have reported even more powerful effects.
I aborted my self-experimentation out of concern that it might cause long-term health effects (as, paradoxically, hyperventilation -- which is what holotorpic breathwork mostly consists of -- can cause oxygen deprivation to the brain) but at least now, one year later, I haven't experienced any adverse health effects that I can detect, so might give it another try.
The really long-term effects (like 10 or 20 years later) are still unknown, though, as there just haven't been any serious long-term studies of it.
Another interesting possibility (which is again, mostly unstudied by science yet) is combining breathwork with other means of inducing altered states of consciousness.
Just like any other even remotely dangerous activity, having someone trusted with experience is the best way. Otherwise start very low and wade in. I would ABSOLUTELY tell young folks to not just go buy alcohol without knowing somewhat how to deal with it. Alcohol at least has enough cultural guard rails that a kid will generally know that drinking an entire liter is a bad idea.
Drugs aren’t really my thing, I’m more of a beer guy, but the first time I was in Amsterdam I experimented with edibles.
The first couple of times was just kind of nice, chilled me out, had a good vibe etc.
Then I got some from a different shop, and it was a nightmare! Headaches, heart racing, hallucinations, and it hurt to open my eyes. I thought my heart was going to explode.
To make matters worse I was sharing a tiny Air BnB (one room basically) with two other friends and there was nowhere to go, so I was just curled up in a ball tripping out while they drank and played cards, for hours!
Just horrendous lol, agree with the other commenters that there needs to be a safe way to try stuff like this out with people who know how to deal with somebody having a bad trip (as opposed to pointing and laughing, as my friends did).
"Then I got some from a different shop, and it was a nightmare! Headaches, heart racing, hallucinations, and it hurt to open my eyes. I thought my heart was going to explode."
You overdosed. Fortunately, the effect of overdosing on cannabis is purely psychological. You may feel miserable and be super paranoid, but there aren't any actual adverse physical effects.
Under such circumstances, if one is 100% sure only cannabis has been ingested and nothing else, and when there really are no adverse physical effects one could reassure the tripper that everything is going to be ok.
Hugs might be welcome, as might other physical contact like holding hands. Try changing the environment to somewhere more pleasant and more peaceful. Going out from a crowded party to peaceful nature might be a good idea. Changing music or putting on more pleasant music might help, as can looking at books of beautiful art or other fascinating images.
Something else that can be really good is having the tripper play a simple physical, acoustic instrument like a drum or a guitar, or to dance, chant or sing. This is an under-utilized and underappreciated technique that can dramatically change the mood as the tripper expresses themselves on a more primal level than speech.
Finally, in difficult trips (whether on cannabis or any other psychedelic) sometimes the best thing to do is not to try to run away but to go towards the difficulty and face it and try to learn from it. What exactly is it that you really fear? Why? Can you embrace it and surrender? Very often doing so will lead to a complete transformation of the experience from one of existential dread to bliss as one "dies" and is reborn.
